Training too much and too often is a big pitfall! You can either train a lot during a session or train often. Seldom can you do both! If you train a body part with a lot of sets and reps, you'll need more than a few days to recover. So somebody who likes to train a muscle group twice or three times per week shouldn't use the same volume per session as someone who's only training each muscle group once per week. Simply put, if you train with a high volume and don't give your body enough time to recover, you won't progress. You may recover enough to avoid regressing, but you won't have large gains.
To get very lean and muscular you must have everything in order, from diet to rest to training. While a proper strength training program will help you get lean, it's really hard to get a high degree of definition without some form of "road work," unless you're genetically gifted for leanness. I'm not a fan of low-intensity cardio. While it's adequate for fat loss, I feel it can have a negative effect on strength and muscle mass. Interval training and/or long distance sprints are optimal to maximize fat loss while retaining muscle mass.
The hamstrings are key to sport performance. Without powerful hams, you can't run fast, you can't jump high, and you can't be explosive. Furthermore, having strong hamstrings is one of the best ways to prevent knee and quadriceps injuries. Finally, a strong set of hams helps improve posture by preventing excessive lumbar lordosis and hip anteversion. I haven't worked with a single athlete who couldn't benefit from extra hamstring work! Train 'em hard!
This new Q & A column is about building a muscular and aesthetic physique. It's not about breaking strength records or reaching speed and power personal bests.
Bodybuilders usually have the slow, controlled exercises covered. They use mostly moderate tension and long TUT (time under tension) methods, which are good to some extent. But I've always believed if you attack an enemy via several fronts you stand a greater chance of winning. Same thing goes with training! Explosive training, not just the Olympic lifts, creates a very brief but extremely high intramuscular tension. This is a powerful growth stimulus that shouldn't be forgotten!
Big Ups I get asked a lot of questions from trainees. Here are the four most frequent: 1. How can I improve my bench? 2. How can I lose fat while gaining muscle? 3. How can I improve my vertical jump? 4. Coach, why does it burn when I pee?
Arms, guns, bazookas... Call them what you wish, but a set of muscular upper arms remains one of the most appealing goals in bodybuilding.
Maximizing strength in an exercise is as much about motor learning as it is about muscle growth. The key to motor learning is frequency of practice . You may have heard that "practice makes perfect." Sorry, but this is simply not true. Practice makes permanent , not perfect. Practice bad motor habits and you'll make this wrong technique/activation factor automatic. We should say that perfect practice makes perfect.
We often say that the most important leg of a three-legged chair is the fourth, the missing one. Well, when it comes to the human body, the muscles composing the hamstring group (biceps femoris – long and short heads, semitendinosus and semimembranosus) are usually that fourth leg.
Life is funny sometimes. Over the course of my T-Nation career I went from a fat but strong guy to a lean and muscular one, despite having the worst "fat loss genetics" in the world. In the past, I made most of my transformations via a low-carb dietary approach, and as a result I became somewhat carb-phobic and truly believed that ingesting carbs would turn me into a fat slob.
Excuses, Excuses We live in a world of excuses. Most people don't want to accept that when something goes wrong in their lives, they're at least partly to blame.
Most North American athletes aren't in very good general shape compared to their European counterparts. This shows the flagrant need for more GPP (general physical preparation) work during the off-season. Athletes should perform a lot of work with sandbags, sleds, and sledgehammers. These tools allow them to improve both aerobic and anaerobic capacity while building usable strength and power. Sandbag lifts (clean, press, push press, row, curl) and carries (arms under bag, bear hug, overhead) will build tremendous core strength and stability
Just the Facts Fact #1: Forcing your body to build muscle requires progressively more physical stress. Fact #2: Your body has a limited capacity to tolerate, respond to, and adapt to stress.
Sticking points are much like those really talkative, naked old men in your gym's locker room: you'd rather avoid them! Nothing's more frustrating than making good progress overall but failing to improve on the "big lifts" (bench press, squat, deadlift, military press, etc.)
A Non-Functional Pile of Muscle! I started out in the iron game by training for football and then Olympic lifting. I competed in the latter for four years: training, eating and breathing Russian and Bulgarian!
"Bodybuilding training? No way! Not for me! I’m training only for strength and function," said the huge sumbitch after deadlifting a load that was roughly equivalent to a Sherman tank.
Different Morphologies, Different Strengths If you plan on staying sane in the iron game, you'd better have a sense of humor. For example, you might be built to excel at one particular lift and be the envy of all your peers. But just when you begin to feel pretty good about yourself, you get humbled by some lamppost who kicks your butt in another lift!
Besides exercise selection, the most important factor involved in developing size and strength is the nature of the load. This is a function of three separate but interrelated elements:
In the strength-training world, there are numerous ways to organize training. Used correctly, all of them can be successful. Without being properly understood, they can also lead to failure. Two popular organizational models are conjugate and complex training:
In the strength-training world, there are numerous ways to organize training. Used correctly, all of them can be successful. Without being properly understood, they can also lead to failure. Two popular organizational models are conjugate and complex training:
Are You A Light Bulb? Bodybuilding is full of colorful descriptions of various physique types. As Grandmaster Poliquin would say, you have your coat racks (thin with as much muscle mass as Kate Moss on Atkins); you have those poor souls who suffer from ILS or Imaginary Lat Syndrome (fake tough guys walking around like they have ten gallon barrels under their arms); and finally you have your light bulbs: guys shaped like turnips with no leg development whatsoever. To be nice we can also call them "top heavy" guys.
Big Bad Europeans The more you're involved in the world of strength training, the more you get to meet interesting people and learn new training methods. Last year I attended the Weider International Grand Prix of Canada, a bodybuilding contest organized by the Quebec Federation that included several of the world's best amateur bodybuilders from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, Poland, etc.
Weird Science When you think of science, the first thing that probably comes to mind is images of atrophied, goggle-wearing weaklings in white coats. Bulging muscles and inhuman strength are certainly not part of your mental image!
Abdominal Court is now in Session High intensity vs. volume training. Olympic lifting vs. powerlifting. High intensity cardio vs. low intensity cardio. The list of debates and disputes in this field goes on and on, and perhaps the most disputed area is abdominal training.
Recover Fast, Grow Fast! Want to gain muscle mass, strength, or power in the fastest way possible? Making rapid progress is a function of two interrelated variables: training stress and restoration/recovery. Basically, you can increase your rate of progress either by improving your training, or improving your body’s capacity to recover from training.
